No Entiendo Nada

How to Enjoy Post-Maria Vieques in 24 Simple Steps

March 1, 2018

Step 1

You get on a small twin-propellor plane in San Juan. It looks like the kind of plane that some weird rich uncle would own because he just loves to fly and promises to take you up for a ride sometime.

You and a handful of strangers climb onboard. The pilot has your girlfriend Adrienne sit up front to be the co-pilot. You wonder what would happen if the pilot had a stroke or something. You imagine Adrienne putting the headset on, taking the controls, and screaming, Where are the brakes?!

Step 2

You land safely at the Vieques airport. Your plane taxis past a row of destroyed airplanes, some flipped upside down. You ride in a van to the car rental office, which is about one-quarter-full of boxes of nonperishable oatmeal. You get a Jeep. The rental car lady tells you not to leave anything valuable in the Jeep and to leave the doors unlocked. People won’t steal your car, she says. They can’t drive it off the island.

Step 3

You drive to your Airbnb in Esperanza. It’s in a partially dilapidated neighborhood with roosters, horses, and dogs sitting around waiting for more nothing to happen. The Airbnb is called El Hostal De Judy. (You change the name of the house and Judy’s name because you never asked for permission to write about Judy on your blog.) Judy is a friendly, fast-talking lady with a Boston accent. Her house hasn’t had electricity for five months, Judy says. Judy tells you that there’s a gas generator they run at night, and you can charge your phone and turn lights on and such. Judy says you can even plug in the DVD player and watch a movie if you want. But don’t use the mini-fridge or the microwave or really anything that heats or cools, Judy warns. The generator can’t handle that. Oh, and don’t drink the water.

Judy invites you to a documentary screening later that night. She says it’s in Spanish, but there will be English subtitles. You tell her you might go, you’ll keep it in mind.

Step 4

You and Adrienne walk to Calle Flamboyan, a touristy street on the south shore of the island. It’s Saturday evening, yet most of the storefronts are closed. Two restaurants and a gift shop are open. The boardwalk has sinkholes taped off. Next to an abandoned restaurant that has mostly fallen into the Caribbean Sea is a couple with an arts-and-crafts table. Adrienne wants to look at the jewelry, so you walk over.

The couple talks to you in Spanish, then in English when your Spanish flunks out. The woman, Jackie, tells you she lives here in Vieques, and she makes a living selling her paintings and jewelry. Jackie says she was here during Hugo when she was a kid, and that was bad, but Maria was worse. When Maria came through, she thought her house was going to explode. She says after the hurricane, the entire street where you’re standing was covered in sand. She didn’t recognize it. It made her so sad. It took three months to clean it up, Jackie says.

Some of Jackie’s paintings depict Maria’s destruction. She tells you about one painting with three crooked palm trees. My husband used to call them “The Three Amigos And The Other One.” she says. She explains there used to be four trees, but Maria destroyed the other tree and now it’s gone. Jackie laughs. You see a smaller painting with brighter colors and four upright palm trees. Are these “The Three Amigos And The Other One?” you ask. Yes, they are! she says. Adrienne buys both paintings so we have a before and an after.

Step 5

You go to one of the two restaurants open. It’s called Bananas. After dinner, you have Adrienne take your photo in one of those head-in-the-hole boards. You make a serious face, and it looks like you’re a stern-faced banana.

Step 6

You go to the documentary screening. The screening is at a fort on top of a hill on the other side of the island that you and Adrienne have to find in the dark. The guy hosting the movie is named Bob. Bob introduces himself to you and Adrienne. Bob is from Massachusetts, but he lives in Vieques now. He apologizes because there’s no remote for the DVD player so no one knows how to turn on the English subtitles, but he says the images alone say plenty. He offers you coffee, but there’s no coffee left, so you and Adrienne make more coffee. Before the screening, Bob announces to the audience in Spanish that you and Adrienne have made more coffee, and you get a round of applause.

You watch the movie. It’s about the history of land reclamation in Puerto Rico, you think. Poor people move into new places where sugarcane farms used to be, then they get kicked out for some reason. Then someone (the government?) builds housing projects for the poor people, but almost none of them can afford to live there, so they move to other places and build houses where they’re not allowed to build or it’s unsafe to build. So the government bulldozes their houses or burns them down. The end.

Step 7

You drive back to El Hostal De Judy. I feel sad, you say to Adrienne. It’s sad what people here have gone through. What they’re going through still. You feel weird about even being here. You make Adrienne play checkers with you because you’re not ready to fall asleep. (You’re a night owl.) Adrienne beats you at checkers and you go to bed, and all night you hear roosters cockadoodling and gas generators humming from all around the neighborhood. It sounds as though all the neighbors decided to mow the lawn at three in the morning.

Step 8

You wake up the next morning. Judy invites you and Adrienne up for breakfast. She serves you coffee and a plate of bananas, bread, and pears. Judy tells you that she moved here after she got fired for fighting racial discrimination in housing at her old job. She got a settlement for wrongful termination.

Judy says she came here to protest the U.S. military because of how they kept bombing Vieques. They used to bomb the island with missiles and mines and torpedoes and whatever else blows things up—not because Vieques was at war with the U.S., but because the U.S. needed a place to practice bombing things so the military would be prepared to bomb other places that needed to be bombed. Judy didn’t think that was right, so one day she drove her car to the bombing range and parked there so they couldn’t blow anything up. One day I just came up against a wall, and it hit me, and I was like, “You are living in imperialism,” Judy says.

Judy got arrested. She was sentenced to twenty days in prison for trespassing. Everyone there was really nice to her, she says.

Step 9

You and Adrienne buy some beer and Doritos and go to the beach. Adrienne tries to set up her hammock between two palm trees, but they’re too far apart. Too bad you can’t use that one, you say while pointing to a ravaged palm tree that’s lying sideways in the sand. You stay at the beach all day. You read. You people-watch. You go in the water, mostly to pee but also to swim. You get a brutal sunburn. You look like a Martian who had a book propped up on his belly all day.

Step 10

You go back to El Hostal De Judy to change, then you go to the other restaurant on Calle Flamboyan that’s open. It’s called Duffy’s. You get a veggie burger. They have the Winter Olympics on all their TVs.

Step 11

After dinner, you and Adrienne go to Mosquito Bay. Mosquito Bay is bioluminescent. That means when the water is perturbed, it glows. You want to see glowing water, so you get on a bus with some other tourists and a tour guide drives you all down a dark, narrow, bumpy dirt road through the forest. A couple times the bus bottoms out, and everyone laughs nervously.

Step 12

The bus comes to the end of the road. Everyone takes their shoes off, grabs a life vest out of a box, and gets out of the bus. The tour guide gathers the tourists into a semicircle. He asks everyone if they’ve ever used a kayak before. Most of the group says no. He puts everyone into pairs and explains the safety rules. One girl doesn’t have a partner. Her friend asks the tour guide why she doesn’t have a partner. That ain’t right, he says. Can’t you go with her? he asks the tour guide. The tour guide explains, somewhat indelicately in his second language, that the girl can’t share a kayak with another person because she has too much weight. Everyone is kind of mortified.

Each kayak pair and the heavy girl are assigned a number. The tour guide tells everyone to shout their number whenever he does a roll call. You all practice: One! Two! (You and Adrienne are Two.) Three! Four. (The heavy girl is Four.) Five! Six! Seven! The tour guide says you all did a great job. You go to the water and get into your kayak. It has a transparent bottom so you can see the water underneath.

Step 13

You paddle out into the water. It’s very dark. The night sky above is awe-inspiring. You and Adrienne follow the tour guide out into the water. He does a roll call: One! Two! Three! Four. Five! Six! Seven!

The water is dark. It’s not glowing. Are we in the bay? you ask Adrienne. I don’t think we’re there yet, she says. You paddle into black water for about ten minutes, then you catch up with the tour guide. The tour guide instructs all the kayaks to cluster together. Number Four is last to arrive. Come to the side of my boat, the tour guide instructs her. How? She asks, exasperated. The tour guide calmly advises Four on how to maneuver closer. She makes it.

The tour guide tells everyone, Welcome to Mosquito Bay. Disappointment hangs in the air as thick as the Milky Way above us. Everyone quietly comes to terms with the fact that this will not be a magical glowing water experience. When we are in Mosquito Bay, we say WOW! the tour guide insists. So everyone says WOW.

The tour guide says that Maria severely disrupted the unique conditions required to produce the glowing effect. That’s why it’s not glowing. It will take some time to recover, he says. The tour guide explains that the glow is created by a microscopic species of plankton that eats decomposed mangrove leaves. They release an enzyme when they’re bothered, which causes a chemical reaction that emits a brief flash of light.

The tour guide asks everyone what Mosquito Bay’s number one enemy is. Hurricanes? Global warming? Humans? Someone blurts out Donald Trump! and everyone laughs like a kid just audibly farted at his great-grandmother’s funeral. It’s humans, the tour guide says. All the chemicals they add to the bay, all the fumes they put into the air, all the different ways they disrupt the bay’s delicate ecology. Humans are bad for the bay. The tour guide wraps up and invites you to enjoy the bay.

Step 14

You paddle around aimlessly with Adrienne. Adrienne is convinced she sees little specks of light when she paddles the water. Yeah maybe, you say. You’re not convinced. You think it’s just the reflection of the stars. She disagrees. She thinks she sees glowing little plankton.

Roll call: One! Two! Three! Four. Five! Six! Seven!

The tour guide tells everyone to head back to the shore. As you paddle back, you look at the water under the transparent kayak. You see tiny sparks glimmer underneath, just barely visible. You tell Adrienne you’ve converted. You’re a believer now.

Step 15

Everyone gets to the shore except kayak number Four. You all wait on the bus while a tour guide leads her out of the water. She finally arrives. You want to hug her or buy her a drink or something, but you don’t. Someone should hug her.

The tour guide drives you back down the gnarled dirt road. The mood is subdued on the return trip. This time no one laughs when the bus bottoms out.

Step 16

You get back to town. The two restaurants that are open are now closed, but the parking lot of the gift shop has turned into an outdoor bar. You and Adrienne stop in for beers. A Russian woman chats up an enthusiastic American man at the bar. A German couple gets intimate at an adjacent table. A Japanese couple, looking slightly lost, wanders in. Across the street some dude bangs on bongos while about a dozen people watch. Behind them the sea is gone, silent and invisible, as dark as Mosquito Bay. You feel like you’re on your own here. The rest of the world might as well be a million miles away in every direction. This place is weird, you tell Adrienne.

Step 17

You go back to El Hostal De Judy. You and Adrienne play a loosely regulated game of Scrabble—placement of the word SIRBONERSLUT is far and away the highlight. You watch a DVD, some documentary about dirt called “Dirt!” We might all starve to death someday because we don’t appreciate the biological complexity of dirt, the documentary posits. Adrienne falls asleep halfway through.

Step 18

You lay in bed listening to the hum of the gas generators outside. You fantasize about the power coming back on. You imagine all the lights suddenly and emphatically switching on, followed by a joyous cheer throughout the neighborhood. Everyone runs out into the street and hugs each other. The chorus of generators are replaced by stereos blasting salsa music. Judy busts out a bottle of fancy champagne she’s been saving for years and pours you and Adrienne a heavy glass. ¡Salud! you exclaim. You all dance in the street until the sun comes up.

None of that happens. The power stays off. The generators stay on. You fall asleep in a position amenable to the sunburn suffused over your body.

Step 19

You wake up to the clamor of middle-aged women talking loudly and enthusiastically in Boston accents. There you go! You’ve got it! You’re doing great, Suzy. There’s a sunrise yoga class next door. Why is everyone here from Massachusetts? you wonder.

Step 20

You go to a bakery for breakfast. The bakery is in Isabel II, the capital city of Vieques. The name makes it sound like it’s the sequel to another city, or maybe a new-and-improved version of a failed city that the locals would rather not remember. But it’s not. It’s named after a Spanish queen. You and Adrienne walk around Isabel II. You stop at a bar for piña coladas, then visit an art gallery.

Step 21

You drive around the island. You find old trees, iguanas, abandoned military bunkers, wild horses, dead horses, hurricane destruction, abandoned houses, dead iguanas. You drive out onto a long seawall to look for sea turtles. Across the sea there’s a big mountainous shadow. It’s Puerto Rico. You find a sea turtle.

Step 22

You go back to the airport. A stray cat wanders in and out of the small terminal. No one seems to mind. You get onto the plane—it’s the same pilot from the first flight. You fly back to San Juan.

As you gaze down at Puerto Rico below, you see large swaths of blue rooftops. It occurs to you that those are tarps.

Step 23

You and Adrienne forget that Uber isn’t allowed to do pickups at the airport. You start walking down the road until a man who was on your tiny plane picks you up in his car. He apologizes for his bad English. You apologize for your bad Spanish. You tell him that he can drop you off anywhere close by. I will bring you somewhere safe, he says. He drives you to a hotel. That was amazing, Adrienne says. You take an Uber from there.

Step 24

You get back to your apartment. There’s electricity. There’s a fridge. There’s internet. There’s Netflix. You can drink the water. The bright red skin on your legs and torso cools and flakes over the next several days. You peel it off, little by little, like an old layer you’ve outgrown.